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The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

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Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#41

Post by catalogia »

rvz wrote: post #16

Apple: We now have an all new redesign for macOS 11... Designers: Apple's done it again, Time to adopt neomorphism in our apps and the web, like we did with flat design and skeuomorphism. Me: About this battery...[0] [0] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-battery-h...

Oh wow, that looks shockingly like the battery widget[plasmoid?] from KDE 4.0. Unfortunately I can't find a screenshot of it, but I recall it being huge, bright green, and very round. What the hell were they thinking?

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#42

Post by quenix »

searchableguy wrote: post #29
rvz wrote: post #16

Apple: We now have an all new redesign for macOS 11... Designers: Apple's done it again, Time to adopt neomorphism in our apps and the web, like we did with flat design and skeuomorphism. Me: About this battery...[0] [0] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/23/macos-big-sur-battery-h...

They went too far on that one. Do designers consider how expensive the gpu rendering is for skeumomorphism or neuromorphism?

What? It is? Forgive my ignorance, but isn't it just bitmap rendering? E.g. rending a flat icon should take approx the same GPU toll as a skeumorphic icon

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#43

Post by [deleted] »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #23
nathanaldensr wrote: post #2

Of course this author's happy--they're a designer . Meanwhile, everyone else has to absorb the burden of the "pendulum" ceaselessly swinging, retraining their brains yet again to absorb new visual memories and habits. There seems to be no such concept as "good enough."

Programming is currently hating on OOP, in love with strong typing, and somewhere on the way from loving microservices to disowning ever to have spoken in their favor. Ten years ago, it was the opposite. So this particular quirk of thinking in groups doesn't seem to be confined to the design domain. Nor do "swings of pendulum" preclude the pendulum also having some forward momentum in sum. Think of it as a skier's wa…

[deleted]

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#45

Post by buboard »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #2

Of course this author's happy--they're a designer . Meanwhile, everyone else has to absorb the burden of the "pendulum" ceaselessly swinging, retraining their brains yet again to absorb new visual memories and habits. There seems to be no such concept as "good enough."

Design is not an optimization procedure like chip design. It's dominated by trends, like fashion. There is a small subset of people who care about optimal design, which measures things like perceptual reaction time etc. That's the military

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#46

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

kumarvvr wrote: post #31
vffhfhf wrote: post #6

What if we could give complete control of visuals to user? I use kde nowadays and the amount of customization is awesome. I am using chrome OS theme with tela icon pack and a cool ass animated mouse pack. And its frankly awesome. I feel like Apple is stagnating.

Why not Apple itself give a few options from minimalist to textured? Sure as hell Apple will not allow too much customization, but they could do the designs themselves and give users a bit more choice.

Apple does allow you to chose between dark and light mode, as well as accent- and highlight colours.

Beyond that, you quickly get to a point where whole layouts would have to change. Doing so, across three to five platforms, would be a major undertaking for Apple itself. And app developers would never be able to consistently support multiple design paradigms, leading to a fractured experience.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#47

Post by alxlaz »

artsyca wrote: post #19
alxlaz wrote: post #10

I don't really care about "fun", but I just can't find the words to explain how happy I am that there's a chance we might put all this flat madness behind us. I'm looking forward to: * Not having this conversation with my mom (who, at 60+, is remarkably adept with computers but hey, we all run into trouble sometimes) over the phone anymore: Me: Okay mom, now press the "Edit" button Mom: Which one's the edit button? M…

You've certainly given this a lot of careful consideration. Edit! First off I appreciate the hate keep it coming. Secondly it's like this dude had this list in his back pocket just waiting for this post to show up so he could get it off his chest. Now back to your regularly scheduled death march

Well, not really in my back pocket, but I did post something similar a while back on my Twitter account. It's not like my list of grievances has changed since then :).

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#48

Post by JoBrad »

sjwright wrote: post #37
mojo982 wrote: post #34

I feel like I'm one of the few people who still likes flat designs. I hope it doesn't swing all the way back to full skeumorphism. YouTube looks way better than it did five years ago. What I do miss is efficient use of space. HackerNews still has a great design, it's really efficient with space. Old school iOS used space efficiently too, because it had to. It only had a 3.5" screen to work with. I miss that.

What I miss since iOS 7 is buttons that look like buttons. BUTTONS THAT LOOK LIKE BUTTONS. Is that too much to ask!?! Why are we stuck with sometimes plain blue text, especially when the use of that blue in UI "elements" isn't even consistent with regards to function or behaviour.

As a user, I like where flat design has taken us, generally. But I absolutely agree with you: the loss of “functionality hinting” (I’m sure there’s an actual term for this, but I don’t know what it is) is pretty bad. You can stumble around a design that isn’t in your language, if the cues are strong enough. But all-text directions throw that right out.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#49

Post by mikhailt »

vffhfhf wrote: post #6

What if we could give complete control of visuals to user? I use kde nowadays and the amount of customization is awesome. I am using chrome OS theme with tela icon pack and a cool ass animated mouse pack. And its frankly awesome. I feel like Apple is stagnating.

Then it will not macOS/iOS as we love it.

The main reason I love iOS and macOS is the consistency in the interface because majority of apps follows the same HIG provided by Apple.

Windows is a mess between various interfaces from various eras of Windows and I dislike it. I don't want to figure things out, the app should just work consistently for me. Even today, various distros are struggling to make sure various GTK/QT/etc apps are themed the same way when you change their theme settings (they're getting better with client side decorations).

I used to play with themes and hacks on Windows, I almost always go back to default because in the long run, it just got boring after a few months and it was annoying. I want consistency and stability more than customization. Even on Pop!_OS I use on my Thinkpad; I've tried various themes and WDM, I just gave up and left it at default, it's fine. The only tweak I need is font scaling to make HiDPI work better.

Re: The Comeback of Fun in Visual Design

#50

Post by buboard »

karaterobot wrote: post #26

People sometimes forget that the move to flat design was not entirely arbitrary and driven by fashion, it was driven by shifting technology and usage. Sure, fashion played a role, but in this case the main driver was the need to support devices of different resolutions. Scalability implies vectors, which implies shapes, fills, and strokes rather than bitmap assets. As a designer who made "skeuomorphic" interfaces bef…

The web already had solved that problem, even with bootstrap version 2. Surely apple provides primitives such as border-radius and gradients, which are enough to create an eye-catching button?
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